Hard drive connected to router - wireless access issues

[Klo]

I have a TP Link N600, which has two USB slots on the back. I've connected an external hardrive as a sort of pseudo NAS. It seems to work fine for my wired desktop, but I can't seem to access the drive when connecting via my wireless laptops.

The method that TP Link suggests is going to run, then typing in \\192.168.1.1. The laptops can't seem to find it for some reason. Is there a setting I need to tick somewhere that will allow them to see it?

Thanks!

 

[Klo]

I assume the attached storage is accessible via the router's IP address. You can find this out by running a command prompt in windows and typing IFCONFIG /ALL and looking at your default gateway for your wireless network adapter. This will tell you the router's IP address and you can do a \\x.x.x.x on that address to reach your hard drive. 192.168.1.1 is a typical router IP address so I'm not surprised that's the instruction.

However if you can reach it on your desktops then I don't know why it would be any different on the wireless clients. Can you ping 192.168.1.1 and get a response on a command line?

I don't know the router specifically but one thing it could be is that the router is setup to provide "guest" wireless access so that your wireless devices connect and can go out to the internet but they are excluded from accessing "internal" network resources which would be anything with a wire as a minimum including your hard drive. Check your router wireless access point settings.

Thanks for your help.

I can indeed ping 192.168.1.1 on my laptop, and guest mode is disabled. I tried the IPCONFIG /ALL and it came up as 192.168.1.1, so I seem to be getting the right thing!

As an experiement, I tried running ftp://192.168.1.1, which opened in a web browser and did allow access. However, I was hoping to map it as a drive like I did on my desktop, and this also requries the user name and password for the router, which I don't really want to give out. It's very strange how it can find that, but not \\192.168.1.1.

 

[Klo]

Have you tried adding ::20 or ::21 at the end of the address? They are usually the default FTP ports and you may need that so Windows Explorer knows where to connect.

You absolutely should be able to do the same on wireless as wired. Few more steps to try having read your router's manual:

1. Is it any different if you connect your laptop to the 2.4Ghz wireless network as the 5Ghz?
2. If you plug your laptop in via ethernet cable does it work?
3. Try enabling your guest networks and ticking the boxes that say, "allow guests to access my network"
4. With your desktop PC on, find out its IP address and ping/tracert from your wireless connected laptop to the desktop to se if you get a response.
5. Share a folder on your desktop PC and see if your wireless connected laptop can access that
6. Instead of trying to access \\192.168.1.1 try accessing \\tplinklogin.net
7. Do you logon to the laptop with the same username and password as your desktop. This article seems to suggest, as many cheap routers do, that you need to have manually setup users with the same credentials on both the router and the machines accessing them: http://www.tp-link.com/en/faq-254.html
8. Same article suggests you can at least disable requiring a password but then I imagine you get less feedback when trying to access the storage as you seem to be experiencing. Perhaps add the user you log onto your laptop with on the router if its different.
9. If you do any of that restart the USB sharing service as directed in the article.

I hope there's something there that works or at least provides some results that can help us hone in on an answer

Check that you don't have a wireless option called 'wireless isolation' turned on in the router wifi settings.

Basically it's another way of doing guest mode.

Many thanks for all of your help, especailly BigT for looking at the manual!

There has been a little progress, my laptop is Windows 8.1, but my friend came over with a Windows 7 laptop that connected wirelessly in the same way as my desktop.

Is there a setting/feature in Windows 8.1 that would stop it working?